Static mesh does not light up terrain

My static meshes light up their surrounding meshes pretty well, but not the terrain they stand on.

I thought it had something to do with the material, but doesn’t seem so.

Hi ssnd292,

Since you don’t mention specifically how you’re lighting your scene I had to presume you’re using the option Use Emissive with Static Lighting for these meshes when you build lighting.

If this is the case, the landscape does not have enough static lighting resolution to show properly bake the emissive lighting in to its lightmap.

For example:

Landscape Static Lighting Resolution: 1.0 (Default)

Landscape Static Lighting Resolution: 3.0

45846-emissive2.png

I am also using Production lighting build quality with a lightmass importance volume around my scene. If you find that a smaller static lighting resolution is not working for you try increasing it incrementally by 1 until you get a resolution that look the way you would like.

I hope this helps.

Tim

Hello Tim, I will give this a try, but a quick question before: This may sound like a total nooby question but: Before I export the game, do I need to rebuilt the lightning in order for it to take effect?

So for example: If I render the lighting with preview settings and export the game, will it look different as if I would render it in production before exporting?

Yes you need to rebuild the lighting if you want the a high quality lighting to be baked and yes there would be a difference between preview and production.

Preview does not cast as many photons for accurate lighting as Production would. Preview is meant to give you an idea of what lighting would look like, but it is far from accurate.

I have some more examples of quality differences between Preview and Production here on our Wiki Lighting Troubleshooting and Tips guide: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums

Here is an example using my scene from earlier:

From top to bottom: Preview, Medium, High, and Production

As you can see with the progression there is more detailed lighting that is transferred across the scene compared to Preview. If you really needed to test I would say use Medium as a base if you’re exporting your game for testing, and then use production later on when you’re finalizing and polishing your final version.

Feel free to ask questions if you get stuck. :slight_smile:

Hello Matt, your suggested solution did not work for me. I gradually raised the Landscape Static Lighting Resolution up until 20 and rendered with production settings, but the situation did not improve.

Depending on your landscapes size this can probably be the reason. The landscape I have is not very large.

As a test, I would suggest setting up a default level that has the floor mesh.

Create a new landscape that is 7x7 quads for section size. Place your emissive with static lighting mesh in the scene and enabled the options for “use emissive with static lighting”. Delete or lower the lighting intensity for the directional light in the scene.

When you place the emissive static mesh, place one over the static mesh floor and one over the landscape. This way you can see a difference between the two and if lighting is being baked correctly.

This is how my example is above. I have the landscape on the left with the walkway being a static mesh so that I can easily see the difference.

Just to clarify you are using the “use emissive for static lighting” option, right?

Hello Tim, yes I do use “Emissive for Static Lighting”.
It works if I create a new level and paste the glowing objects into there, but not with my old terrain, so I guess I made something wrong while creating. I will try what you suggested, but anyway, the matter itself is resolved, so we can close this case.

Thanks!